The Lands of Perpetual Recession

Rural poverty is something we can all pretend to understand. It's all about using the right words, the sympathetic gestures and the apt amount of righteous indignation. But it really startles you when you confront it face to face and you find yourself not sympathising so much as grappling with the sheer deprivation that exists in the heartlands of every country. These are the people that globalization and the bandwagon that goes with it missed out on. Yet they bear the costs without a tangible benefit in sight. Their village water resources are bled dry to fuel cola company plants for urban consumers. They're the ones left hanging dry when IMF reforms force states to rollback on their aid, so that capital can flow into the cities and give them the much desired structures of glass and steel.